Dr. Anne Lafont is a professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. A specialist in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and visual culture in the transatlantic world, her interests include early modern art and the material culture of France and its colonial empire, as well as contemporary art, Blackness, and diasporic Africa. She has published extensively on art and knowledge in imperial contexts, artistic historiography, and gender issues. Now she is researching the invention and making of African art in the early modern period. Lafont’s books include L’artiste savant à la conquête du monde moderne; 1740, un abrégé du monde—Savoirs et collections autour de Dezallier d’Argenville; and L’art et la race: L’Africain (tout) contre l’œil des Lumières, which received the Prix Littéraire Fetkann Maryse Condé and Prix Vitale et Arnold Blokh. She recently received a fellowship from Villa Albertine (Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States), and she currently serves as Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor at Williams College.